Privilege escalation in Cisco Content Security Management Appliance (Sma)

CVE-2021-1447

A vulnerability in the user account management system of Cisco AsyncOS for Cisco Content Security Management Appliance (SMA) could allow an authenticated, local attacker to elevate their privileges to root. This vulnerability is due to a procedural flaw in the password generation algorithm. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by enabling specific Administrator-only features and connecting to the appliance through the CLI with elevated privileges. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root and access the underlying operating system. To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have valid Administrator credentials.

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published 2021-05-06 · last modified 2026-06-17.